He placed his hands flat on the bed, pushing his torso up. It was harder than he would have thought. It wasn’t just that he’d used up a lot of his energy but it was also that his body didn’t want to leave hers, not in any way. Not even separating his chest from her breasts. And farther below, his dick was screaming Are you crazy? You want out of here? What’s the matter with you?
His better nature was warring with his animal side, which wanted nothing more than to settle back down on top of her with a sigh, nuzzle her neck and start fucking her again.
His phone pinged. He’d set his text messages to hologram and the bright letters appeared above it. The message was from Stella.
outside door
He smiled. His better nature had just had a friendly shove.
Pulling out of Catherine was not easy, though. It felt cold away from her skin, outside her body. Standing up was harder than he thought. Her body was like this huge magnet pulling him toward her. He had to move each muscle consciously to get out of bed. With a sigh he bent to retrieve his pants.
“What was that?” Her voice sounded sleepy.
“Something you might enjoy. Sit up in bed.”
She shook her head, eyes still closed. “No way. Something or someone stole my spinal cord. I may never sit up again.”
Well, he had a way to persuade her. He opened the door and sure enough the magic cart was outside. Bless Stella. He was in no shape to get dressed and go down in search of some food. He didn’t want to see anyone or talk to anyone except Catherine. Stella made sure he didn’t have to.
Right now, this room held everything he wanted.
He wheeled the cart in, leaning over and breathing deeply, luxuriating in the smells, like a foretaste of heaven. The smells reached the bed and Catherine’s nose twitched, her lips moving in a ghost of a smile.
“Sit up, honey,” he said. “But keep your eyes closed.”
That earned him a full-blown smile. “If you think it’s a surprise, I can smell it from here. Only I have no idea what time it is, and whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner.”
He lifted covers over dishes, peeked. Jesus. His mouth started watering. “Dinner. Now sit up.”
“Can’t,” she sighed.
“Okay.” He bent over, grasped her under her arms and easily lifted her until she was sitting against the headboard. “No peeking now.”
Her head tilted to one side, eyes closed. “Okay. No peeking.”
Her head slumped a little more to the side.
“No falling asleep, either.” She smiled, eyes closed, and he couldn’t resist her, bending to touch his mouth to hers.
His world exploded.
Christ. He did see colors. Bright shards of light moving through him as he felt her. Felt her. Felt her bone-deep contentment like smooth honey in his veins, felt how unusual sated contentment was to her, felt . . .
He swallowed heavily.
He could feel, so strongly he could almost touch it, her affection, a burst of emotions centered on him. Through her eyes he was handsome and strong and good. Though she wasn’t touching him in any way, was indeed resting bonelessly against the headboard, eyes closed, hands limp, palms up on the bedspread, tendrils of her warm feelings reached out and grabbed him, hard. These . . . things snaked through his body, tangling through his system until he couldn’t tell where he stopped and she began.
It was like being lost in a fragrant, sun-filled jungle, vines clutching at him, holding him down, and damned if he didn’t want to be held.
He stood for a second, looking down at her, at this woman who had unexpectedly crawled inside him, right under his skin. Beautiful and smart and somehow wanting him.
Mac had never had this in his life before. The closest relationship he had ever had had been with the Captain, but that had been a bond of duty and admiration and obedience. Nick and Jon—they were his men and he was sworn to lead them and protect them, but before the Arka fiasco had gone down, he hadn’t known them well. After Arka, they’d worked hard together to protect themselves and to protect their little community, but Mac felt more loyalty to them than affection.
Affection, love—these hadn’t ever played any kind of role in his life. He’d built himself from the ground up, an orphan who’d nearly drowned in the sewers of the system. The navy had saved him, given him direction and purpose, and the Captain had given him pride and duty and responsibility, but none of that had ever touched his heart. He wasn’t even sure he had one, though he was now.
Because it was beating for her.
Because this woman touched his heart. No, she didn’t just touch it. She reached out past skin and bone and muscle and grabbed his heart directly, squeezing it hard, wrapping herself around it so tightly he didn’t know where he ended and she began.
Dangerous, heady stuff and it made his head swim.
He straightened, scowling, wishing like hell he could put all these roiling emotions inside him down to some drug or fancy form of hypnosis or some crazy mind-control technique, but he knew it wasn’t that. It was all real and it came from him, from the deepest part of him that responded to her like a key in a lock.
Dealing with a firefight was easier than this. This was mind-bending, life-altering stuff and knocked him straight out of his boots.
“So?” she asked softly. “Can I open my eyes?” She drew in a deep appreciative breath. “It smells glorious.”
“Not yet.”
He angled the cart close to the edge of the bed, wondering how this was going to work without plates, then realized there was stuff on a shelf below. God, he was going to get something special for Stella the next time he went out into the World because bless her, she’d thought of everything. On the lower shelf was a foldout tray, plates, glasses, napkins and silverware.
Mac started to fold the tray out over her lap when he stopped, frowning. She was naked, the sheet barely held over her breasts, tucked under her arms.
Though a naked Catherine was a very good thing and though he couldn’t imagine anything finer than seeing and touching her breasts while he ate, a lot of the food was hot and the thought that she might be burned by hot food made him queasy. Mac knew firsthand the blinding pain of burns, soul-searing torment that went on forever. He couldn’t bear to think of Catherine going through anything like that.
Not an option.
“Hold up your arms.” He pulled out a clean folded tee from a drawer, shook it out, floated it over her head. “Here. You’ll be more comfortable this way. And you can open your eyes now.”
They opened immediately and met his and it was a punch to the stomach. No soft tendrils around his heart, no glowing heat flowing gently through his veins like honey. This was desire, hot and strong and hard as rock. Nothing gentle about it, just something vast and necessary. Strong as painless fire.
She knew it, she could feel it, he could almost see the lines going from him to her. Connection, deep and clear. Desire, like a blast furnace, fiercely strong, from him to her, strong and hot.
Her eyes widened and she instinctively flinched back against the headboard. God. She looked almost eerily delicate, his tee on her so huge the neck almost slipped off her shoulders. Her eyes were wide, fixed on his, confused swirls of emotion buzzing around her, darkening, and he realized with a sigh that she wasn’t ready for Round Two. He frowned. Round Three.
At some deep level she wanted it but at an even deeper level she was frightened by it and it scared him that this made sense to him. That he could read her like that.
He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles, one by one. He turned her hand over and kissed the palm. Her hand cupped his chin, one finger stroking his burn scars.
Normally, he hated that. He didn’t like being touched, not even in the heat of sex. He often held a sex partner’s hands above her head because he had heavy scars along his back, too. The deep, thick scars—shrapnel from an IED—were souvenirs of Fuckedupistan, well before he was fucked up at Arka, but the two together we
re like a roadmap of pain and violence. What he’d done with his life written on his skin.
He didn’t need the light for a woman to be curious. Even in the dark, you could feel his scars and he hated the question—what happened?
What the fuck do you think happened? He’d had to bite that one back a lot.
This was completely different. Catherine ran her soft fingers over the entire scar, rippled, melted flesh on the left side of his face that went from the top of his forehead down to under his chin. He had a working left eye by a miracle.
The tone of her feelings changed, softened. No fear, something else.
“I can feel your pain,” she whispered.
And she could. He could tell. Everything about her darkened and tightened, and Christ, he couldn’t stand it, not for one second. He didn’t want her to feel his pain. He didn’t want her to feel any pain, ever.
“Don’t,” he whispered back, clasping his hand over hers. Her hand under his was warm and seemed to emit light. All of her was light. “Don’t think of it.”
She shook her head, eyes never leaving his. “How can I not think of it, when it’s so close, right there under your skin? I can feel it. It never goes away. Not physical pain but the other kind.” Her hand traced down, over his neck, chest, to rest over his heart. Her hand seemed to pulse in time with his heartbeat. Skin against skin, skin melding into skin. “The kind that’s worse. I wish I could take it away for you.”
He smiled, something he did rarely. The burn scar puckered and stretched when he smiled. It wasn’t painful, just uncomfortable, and so he hardly ever smiled. There wasn’t much to smile about anyway. There’d never been much to smile about.
“You are taking it away,” he said in a low voice. It was true. Heat spread from her hand, filling his chest, curling inside him like smoke. The Captain’s betrayal, he and his men, who had pledged their lives to their country, on the run like outlaws, accused of treason . . . it faded to background noise. The sharp pain of it was gone, dissipated like morning mist.
The spiky, ragged, almost painful desire he’d felt only a few minutes ago had subsided, replaced with a liquid glowing need for her, strong and steady and true. Sex, surely. Desire, yes. But something else, something deeper and more necessary than that. What he felt was passing through her hand into her.
He took in a deep breath, her hand rising and falling with his chest.
“I want you. Again.” The words came out a gentle whisper, where moments before they would have come out painful and raw.
He leaned into her hand, knowing she could read everything about him through the skin of her hand, something flowing between them, hot and rapid and bright with the glow of passion laced with tenderness.
He didn’t press against her, didn’t try to convince her, just waited, feeling the ebb and flow and swirl of emotions in her. He watched her carefully, though he could read her better through the hand touching him than he could from the expression on her face.
But oh God, he couldn’t take his eyes from her face. She was so beautiful. It was as if someone had reached deep into his head to pull out his own personal template for a beautiful woman and had created her entirely from what was in him. Everything about her was just so fine—the pale, porcelain-smooth skin, huge silver eyes, luscious mouth, long, slender neck. Though his tee covered her breasts, he didn’t need to see them because burned in his memory was the feel of them in his hands, soft and firm, the way her nipples felt against his tongue . . .
A flash of heat. From her. He could see colors swirl around her breasts, faintly red and orange, while her skin turned rosy from her face to her shoulders. And there, between her thighs, under the blanket, a glow—unmistakably warm with desire.
Catherine let him pull his tee over her head and rose up onto her knees, kissing him gently, the hand over his heart smoothing its way up, over his shoulder, around his neck.
“Yes,” she said.
Chapter Twelve
Millon Laboratories
Palo Alto
Lee loved the forbidden and secret fourth subterranean floor of the laboratory.
Level 4.
Millon management had no idea it was there.
With Flynn’s money he’d bribed the construction company, who had brought in an entirely new crew for the floor and had sealed it off. It was more than state-of-the-art, it was years ahead of its time. There could be a magnitude 8 earthquake, a ten-ton atom bomb could be set off, a tsunami could roll into the Sierra Nevada and the lab would survive. It had its own generator, the power coming in over separate cables from hidden solar panels. Ferrite rods piercing the flooring into the earth were capable of sending very long-wave broadcasts directly through the earth to Beijing. Should anyone get through his net security he had a backdoor method of communication.
Lee was king here. When he came to the Millon lab, he came as head of research of the majority holding company, nothing more. Nobody at Millon had a clue he was directing research in a secret lab.
He loved slipping down to the fourth floor unobserved.
He had three assistants sworn to secrecy, thinking they were working under top secret conditions for the company itself and had been promised nonexistent stock options in a nonexistent rollout of a drug that cured dementia. What was very real, however, was the money each lab rat had in an account in the former Maldives, now underwater and relocated to the coast of India.
The researchers and his personal security team were the only ones with access to the floor.
SL-59 was being tested. Behind a sliding steel door was the animal testing lab, where accelerated testing was carried out in ways which were illegal under the Animal Testing Bill. If they’d followed protocol they would still be on SL-8. Lee swiped his security card and walked through, feeling a slight wind at his back due to the negative pressure of the animal test lab.
The drug was delivered via a modified virus and care was taken to make sure nothing escaped. There was nothing contagious in this molecule, it was simply a precaution.
He strolled to the back of the huge room, ignoring the rows and rows of animals in cages in varying stages of death, knowing that federal officials would shut the lab down if they could see this. What they were doing contravened every single animal protection law on the books.
And yet the human experiments were perfectly legal, with the Informed Consent forms signed. Even though many of the consent forms had been signed five minutes before the patient had been declared incompetent.
It still baffled him how Americans almost seemed to care more for animals than for humans, though animals were absolutely necessary for testing drugs. Because here he was, very close to the formula of a drug that would enhance soldiers’ abilities by a factor of ten, and it had only taken two years.
Yesterday, ten bonobos had been administered 5 cc’s of SL-59. They would be thoroughly studied in the weeks to come, but Lee wanted to be the first to observe them, get a feel for the effects before analysis started.
The lab was huge, stretching four hundred feet toward the north gate, row after pristine row of animals in Plexiglas cages. Ordinarily, he’d check every cage, each row undergoing a specific test protocol. But he was angry at Flynn and pressed for time so he strode straight to the back, without looking left or right. The back row held the bonobos, infocubes of data accessible via a touchpad on the front of each cage. The gender and genetic history of each animal, a full medical workup, MRI and CAT scan data, results of intelligence tests, remote sensing of EEGs and EKGs, dosages of SL-59—all that and more was in the infocubes.
He went down the row, clear cage after clear cage, swiping his finger on the touchpad, screening for major anomalies. Two of the animals were dying, EEGs irregular, EKGs with unusual spikes he’d study later. The spikes would hold the key to their deaths, he was sure.
Four more seemed normal, with normal readings, but they were listless.
Number Eight, a largish male, on the other hand, was standing, eyes alert. H
mm. Lee swiped and scanned the data that appeared in light letters in the air. Perfectly normal values. The animal was watching him, seeming almost to take his measure, brown eyes deep and steady.
Interesting.
Bonobos were a placid species, not aggressive by nature, but their heart rate tended to increase slightly in the presence of an alien species. Number Eight’s heart rate remained steady and regular. The animal stood straight and still and watched him calmly. Only his eyes moved, checking Lee’s face, then his hands. Was he checking for weapons? That would be a sign of unusual intelligence.
Very interesting.
Lee stepped forward, and so quickly the EKG didn’t have time to measure the acceleration of heartbeat, the bonobo flung himself straight at Lee, so hard and fast the animal’s snout smashed against the Plexiglas at the front of the cage, inches from Lee’s face, spattering blood out to the corners. The glass was so transparent Lee took a quick step back, flinching, before he stopped himself. The blood looked as if it were drops suspended in the air.
Undeterred, Number Eight smashed against the glass wall again and again in a frenzy of ferocity, trying to bite his way to Lee, striking his snout so hard against the unbreakable glass that bloody shards of teeth flew in all directions. He tried to claw his way to Lee, too, striking his paws so hard he broke first his left ulna and then his right humerus in compound fractures exiting bloodily from the hairy flesh of the arm. Number Eight struck again and again and again, even after he surely understood there was no breaking through the glass.
Bonobos reasoned, on a primitive level. Lee had watched them make rudimentary tools, obey a limited vocabulary of words. An ordinary primate would have learned that attacking the wall was utterly pointless, yet Number Eight kept battering himself wildly against the wall of the cage, which was no longer transparent but covered in blood and fur and spittle.
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